Saturday, 29 October 2011

Friday 28th Oct.2011
In our never ending search for our local migratory salmon today we've travelled 18 miles to Dunsop Bridge in the beautiful Forest of Bowland, an area of outstanding natural beauty. From the village which has the claim to be the centre of the British Isles we followed the River Dunsop (a tributary of River Hodder and then in turn the River Ribble) up the valley a couple of miles to where the valley forks and took the right fork and followed Whitendale Water up the valley for another couple of miles. This is an area of griitstone fells, deep valleys and peat moorland mostly lying in N.E. Lancashire and owned by the Duchy of Lancaster and United Utilities (who look after the water extraction) for the water supply for N.W. England.
Up this remote valley we came across a team of four young ecologists from the Environment Agency and Ribble Catchment Conservation Trust carrying out a river survey on the fish and aquatic life of this upland steam, they sampled a 25 meter stretch with nets and electrofishing and the results were very encouraging with a good population of young trout, sea trout and salmon, 42 in all plus a couple of sea trout around the 11/2 lbs in weight, there were no salmon stunned in any of the stretches they surveyed because for reasons not fully understood the run of fish up the Forest of Bowland tributaries is always about a month later than the other areas in the same river system, their genetic makeup must be slightl different.

The start of the walk... the village green at Dunsop Bridge

A couple of visually unsympathetic fish passes up the lower part of the valley near to the waterworks

Higher up the valley in Whitendale the scenery becomes wilder

The site of the river survey

Two young Brown Trout

Young Salmon (Salmon Parr)

The boggy moorland above the higher reaches of Whitendale Water in Whitendale, here the fish have difficulty reaching the higher stretches of the river because of water extraction by the water company

Monday, 24 October 2011

Monday 24th November 2011
The new fish pass that is being constructed in our local town of Burnley, Lancashire should be completed on the 21st Oct. It will hopefully bring salmon and sea trout back through the centre of Burnley for the first time for over 200 years. I've just finished a short film of this project for the Burnley Film Makers which will be part of the 2011 newsreel which will be shown to the public on Nov.16th at Higham Village Hall.

Monday, 17 October 2011

Saturday 15th Oct. 2011
It's more than 50 years since I began my Autumn visits to Stainforth Force to see the yearly salmon run as they move up river to the headwaters around Ribble Head. It's here where the River Ribble tumbles down over 3 waterfalls into the Stainforth Foss, a pool about 30ft deep. This has always been a popular place to see the salmon and it's always been known locally but this year on the BBC's popular "Autumn Watch" programme website it gave information as to where salmon could be seen (in your area) and it named Stainforth Force, so instead of the usual few people watching, on one count I counted over 60 people at the side of the falls all enjoying this annual event.
This year we took 2 of our grandsons to watch the salmon jumping and they really enjoyed it, perhaps more than we did, because we were conscious of the constant danger of them falling into the water because they never stayed still.

My name is David Crossley I am married with two grown up children and five grandchildren. I am a retired Engineering Instructor, retired in 1999. I have many interests - I am a member of Burnley Film Makers, an amateur film maker and photographer, a walker,all aspects of the great outdoors, wildlife gardening, wild life ponds and wild orchids. The highlight of my walking was probably trekking through the Himalayas in Nepal.

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